Commonwealth is an old middle English word that derives from an older word, commonweal, which was understood as a general good that was shared, a common well-being. It suggests a mutuality and shared strength. It evokes relationships, the idea of a common inheritance. It is, you could argue, the counterpoint to the Yolngu word for selfishness, for lack of kinship. Commonwealth is kinship.
It is to a completed commonwealth that I wish to belong. A commonwealth not just of states but more fundamentally a commonwealth of kin, a commonwealth of the Dreaming, of 60,000 years of civilisation. That’s the land I want to walk to, and it’s time we began the journey along the path Indigenous Australia has with grace shown us. To tomorrow. To hope.

It is in the Indigenous languages I hear all around me here, each a different way of divining the universe, unique and irreplaceable. It is in the cosmology and wisdom of traditional communities; it remains artfully written over much of our landscape in the fire-shaped patterning of bush, scrub and grassland; it stares back at us from the great rock paintings of the past and the extraordinary Indigenous art of today, from the films of Warwick Thornton to the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye to the dance of Stephen Page, to the exquisite beauty of Michael Long holding the ball out to Carlton in the 1993 grand final, daring anyone to be better, as a grand final became wholly about his time, and his place, and his magnificent wonder.
And in that strange frozen moment of pure motion, as Australia thrilled as a man seemed to move at once backward and forward in time in defiance of time and space, it is possible to see also that our great struggle as a nation has always been to find ourselves in each other – the white in the black, the black in the white.

Whether we choose to recognise our cultural past or not, it is written in the land all around us.

I hope one day someone finds an Indigenous word to describe the unique nature of this enduring tragedy, this eternity of crimes, crimes that continue and that continue to deform us all, black and white, a word particular to our national tragedy’s own epic lineaments of suffering, resistance and endurance, a word such as the Holocaust is to the Jewish tragedy, as the Holodomor is to the Ukrainian tragedy.

The world is being undone before us. History is once more moving, and it is moving to fragmentation on the basis of concocted differences, toward the destruction of democracy using not coups and guns to entrench autocracies and dictators, but the ballot box and social media.
The bonfire of our vanities is fully loaded with the fuel of growing inequality, fear, and division
We see gay and transgender people being once more scapegoated, and we see race and religion used to divide. We see truth everywhere denied. Duterte. Orbán. Erdoğan. Putin. Democracy is withering in Poland. Slovakia. Cambodia. Once great nations are lost in division that with each passing day grows more intractable. The chaos of Brexit. The catastrophe of Trump’s white nationalism.
My warning is this: if we here in Australia do not reimagine ourselves we will be undone too.

I wonder if notions of 'nationalism' have always been somewhat fragmented?

And as I boarded flight after flight, making my way slowly northwards, I wondered what joins us over such a vast expanse, what connects wintry worlds with tropical? What finally joins us as people into this idea that we call Australia?
And the answer is story. The story of us as a nation. The story of us as Australia and as being Australian.

Doctorow creates these oppositional positions to make a point and to highlight that there is a war over epistemology, or the way in which we produce knowledge.The reality is much messier, because what’s at stake isn’t simply about resolving two competing worldviews. Rather, what’s at stake is how there is no universal way of knowing, and we have reached a stage in our political climate where there is more power in seeding doubt, destabilizing knowledge, and encouraging others to distrust other systems of knowledge production.

As the institutional construction of news media becomes more and more proximately divorced from the vast majority of people in the United States, we can and should expect trust in news to decline. No amount of fact-checking will make up for a widespread feeling that coverage is biased. No amount of articulated ethical commitments will make up for the feeling that you are being fed clickbait headlines.

no amount of innovative new business models will make up for the fact that you can’t sustain responsible journalism within a business structure that requires newsrooms to make more money quarter over quarter to appease investors. This does not mean that you can’t build a sustainable news business, but if the news is beholden to investors trying to extract value, it’s going to impossible. And if news companies have no assets to rely on (such as their now-sold real estate), they are fundamentally unstable and likely to engage in unhealthy business practices out of economic desperation.

ROI capitalism isn’t the only version of capitalism out there. We take it for granted and tacitly accept its weaknesses by creating binaries, as though the only alternative is Cold War Soviet Union–styled communism. We’re all frogs in an ocean that’s quickly getting warmer. Two degrees will affect a lot more than oceanfront properties.

Trust cannot be demanded. It’s only earned by being there at critical junctures when people are in crisis and need help. You don’t earn trust when things are going well; you earn trust by being a rock during a tornado.

URL

If there is one takeaway from the Cambridge Analytica story and the Facebook hearings and so on, it is that democracies, and that means democratic governments, need to get a handle on these phenomena right away, because the general public does not and cannot know the extent to which giving away apparently “impersonal” data might, in fact, reveal our most intimate secrets.

Golumbia says that governments need to get on top of issues associated with data, because the public is struggling.

Yes, we should be very concerned about putting direct personal data out onto social media. Obviously, putting “Democrat” or even “#Resist” in your public Twitter profile tells anyone who asks what party we are in. We should be asking hard questions about whether it is wise to allow even that minimal kind of declaration in public and whether it is wise to allow it to be stored in any form, and by whom. But perhaps even more seriously, and much less obviously, we need to be asking who is allowed to process and store information like that, regardless of where they got it from, even if they did not get it directly from us.

Golumbia warns about what we share only when we do not really know who is collecting such information.

Tags

Annotators

URL

In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

Annotators

URL

Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

In relation to the question of mind-control verses corruption, I wonder where the difference exists. Does corruption involve some element of 'mind-control' to convince somebody that this is the answer?

It’s fashionable to treat the dysfunctions of social media as the result of the naivete of early technologists, who failed to foresee these outcomes. The truth is that the ability to build Facebook-like services is relatively common. What was rare was the moral recklessness necessary to go through with it.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica raise the question of just because we can, it doesn't mean we should.

Cambridge Analytica are like stage mentalists: they’re doing something labor-intensive and pretending that it’s something supernatural. A stage mentalist will train for years to learn to quickly memorize a deck of cards and then claim that they can name your card thanks to their psychic powers. You never see the unglamorous, unimpressive memorization practice

The comparison between Cambridge Analytica (and big data in general) with the stage mentalist is intriguing. I am left wondering about the disappointment and disbelief in the truth. Sometimes there is a part of us that oddly wants to be mesmerised and to believe.

Annotators

URL

the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

Adam Greenfield touches on this in his book Radical Technologies, see an extract here.

At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

So often we consider technology as being about particular things, but it can be much more fruitful when thinking of it as a system.

Annotators

URL

I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.

I have been wondering about your following page / blogroll lately. I looked into Colin Walker's plugin, but really did not want to rewrite all my links.

I have also been looking into archive page templates and assume that just as an archive can be incorporated into a widget or within a template, you have done the same thing with your 'blogroll', therefore when you add somebody new (seemingly weekly, if not daily) then your page automatically updates?

Tags

Annotators

URL

the only filter worth having is the one that distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not; what matters and what doesn’t.When you filter by right or wrong, not only are you trying to paint a whole with the smaller component of its parts, but you’re also limiting what you understand. Who is to say that there isn’t a lesson in what is wrong? Or more importantly, who is to say that what you assume to be right or wrong is just a current bias that, one day, you will come to readjust?Any time I reread a book that has been important to me in the past, I always come back with new lessons. Most books contain more than one idea, and they say different things in different places.

According to Zat Rana, reading is not about being right or wrong, but rather about being open new ideas and lessons.

Every word, every sentence, and every paragraph of a good piece of writing has the potential to teach you something. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be selective about what you read or that you can’t give up on something that isn’t speaking to you. What it means is that for something to move you, you have to be ready to be moved.

Tags

Annotators

URL

You might start in those more restrictive environments (assuming you can migrate out with safety and ease) and then move up when you feel the box is too cramped. Making your moves after hitting the limits makes sense to me. If you’re very happy with a particular box then taking on the extra work, however minimal, when you don’t want the reward doesn’t make sense. Maybe that’s the deal. Take advantage of your freedom. Try many things. Make and destroy. Make again. Have fun with your freedom.

I like the point about limits. I have encouraged people in the past to set up their own domain, only to have them get annoyed when they decided to stop turning up.

If people do not see the limits of spaces such as WP.com or Edublogs, then maybe they are fine? They are still afforded some choice and can upgrade at a later point if they wish.

Tags

Annotators

URL

Finally, keep in mind that most of us are not taught to do this in the preparation for our careers. We should be, but we’re not. Most of the people developing and facilitating these educational and career prep programs are trying to figure all of this out for themselves…let alone teach you. We need to develop a domain that we control and put in the same amount of polish that we do our offline identities. Offline, we pick out a certain outfit, shoes, and hairstyle that fits our persona. We have a certain way that we want to be viewed, and select options, or habits that help create that persona. Online, we’re often a mess of half-formed elements and inconsistent information that doesn’t share the “real” version of your digital identity. Think about the version of you that you want to create…and make it happen.

I find this a really interesting point about polish. When I think about the possibility of students owning their own site, do they have control over this? They are often forced to wear a set uniform, does the same mindset apply with DoOO?

I think we should all have a domain of our own that we control and can edit over time. We should have one space online that we call our own, and is not owned by another corporation, group, or entity. The one, “best” representation of you online should not be your LinkedIN or Facebook page. This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have. You can write yourself into existence.

I always feel conflicted by the notion of 'ownership'. There is still a dependency on others for infrastructure, such as hosting. I wonder if a 'lease' is a better metaphor, as it feels like more than renting.

Annotators

URL

An annotation service like Hypothesis allows you to highlight, save, and (possibly) share individual lines from a text. This allows for saving this content across a page, and across multiple pages for themes. Used in discussion, this allows for collaborative reading exercises, or group annotations. This also allows for conducting research while you write and annotate. Since Hypothesis will import PDFs, you can annotate in the tool, it will give you a digital trail of breadcrumbs as you’re reading online to see what you found to be important. After you are finished reading and researching, you can go back and see what texts you’ve read, and the important elements from these pieces. Furthermore, if you effectively tag your annotations, you can look for larger themes across your readings.

Tags

Annotators

URL

Bill Fitzgerald provides some useful tips recently in a webinar in regards to Terms of Service. He suggested searching for the following words associated with consent forms: third party, affiliations, change, update and modify.